by Geary Gravel
March professed himself satisfied at last that the kin was a body with a healthy if untenanted brain—as such, it could probably be controlled by the application of the Dance. He began the construction of a patterning frame, doggedly following the kin from meadow to meadow with his calibration board and his measuring devices, while Raille—who assumed that her own duty to keep the kin alive, whatever that might entail, had also begun—gathered botanical samples and wrote in her journal in those same meadows, keeping the soldier and his subject at a safe but observable distance.
Marysu spent much of her time alone. Seemingly as reclusive as the empath, she kept to her room, where she immersed herself in holodot and chip recordings of Belthannis. Occasionally she went outside the Hut, usually at twilight, walking by herself in the cool wilderness. She avoided the company of others, unusually subdued in her speech and manner. She spoke very little at all—even to Jack, who was to be found increasingly wherever Cil happened to be working. Marysu seemed not to notice.
She was ridding her mind of Inter; she was cleansing all of her languages from her thoughts for a time, preparing for the moment when the world-speech of Belthannis would germinate within her and she would begin to create the language of the kin. In her room, eyes on shimmering vistas of woodland and meadow, she partook of the drug called gielh, and her eyelids beneath the paint and silvershadow took on a bruised look.
Cil made tests on water, soil, air, the microbiotic ambient, spending long sleepless hours afloat on prodrugs as she scanned the data taken by the robot probes set in orbit by the original Survey team more than two years before. At the end of the second week she approached Emrys with a request for transportation.
"Something I can cover ground with. Not an aircar. Another week or two, maybe less, and I'll have to get away from all of you for a while," she said with her gentle smile. "I'm absorbing a lot of facts. I'll need the solitude to sort them out, do you see? I want to take a look at some of the other kin, as well. I thought I'd head up north to a few of the nearer territories."
Emrys assented, and the next day the Hut disgorged an elegant construction of plax and metalmock through an iris in its southern wall. Here was a Tech creation embellished by artists: a mechanical mantis shape in pale green and silver, with many-jointed legs and a pair of hidden wings that fluttered out for stability in flashes of iridescence over uncertain terrain. A bright-red parasol perched incongruously above the canopy like an inverted poppy, shading the cushioned blue seats.
"Droshky" Marysu said, frowning at the gleaming shape on one of her infrequent sojourns outside her room. "Call it droshky. Means carriage."
The communicant's fingers touched the door and it slipped open.
The room was behind the door again as it had been three days before, as it had been twice the previous week. That in no way promised that the room would be there the next day, or that night, or even in another hour. Treat each event as an isolate. Regard it with senses both clear and without predisposition, said the later chapters of the Eng Barata. Nothing is the same. Nothing is certain save the presence of change.
There was a desk. The touch-man was seated behind it. Becoming aware that the door had opened, the touch-man lifted his eyes, emotions stirring up in his mind like leaves before a wind.
"You've come." Ernrys smiled his welcome automatically. "Good. Take a seat, if you wish. There's wine here in the second drawer, if you're dry."
As always there-was no response, the visitor wavering at the door like a soap bubble, then entering the room at last as if borne on a random breeze. He seated himself silently, colorless face like a cold narrow moon above the gray garments, eyes on the wall somewhere behind Emrys' head.
"I have the pictures to show you," Emrys said, turning away with a grimace and busying himself at his desk. He was determined to match the other's aloofness for once, instead of begging for attention as he had found himself doing during previous encounters. "I assume that's why you're here, yes? Mm, if not you can always say so, right? I'll just be another moment sorting here, then we can begin."
He glanced at the dark unfocused eyes, looked away, then back again.
"I swear I feel more alone after you come into the room than I do when I'm here by myself," he remarked at last with a small shake of his head. "Granted you've no use for conversation, but you could at least nod or twitch once in a while, so 1 wouldn't chatter away like a tree-hopper." He extracted a tab of holodots, ran his finger along the coded margin. "Yes,
well—I'll continue on in my merry fashion and you chime in whenever the mood strikes you. Ah, here's one of them." He laid the strip carefully outside the circle of confusion at the center of his desk.
"The others, they think I'm very foolish, you know—the way I persist in meeting with you like this. Wait, I tell them, he's here for a reason. It's something important, I can feel it, and it's bound to be something useful." He shook his head ruefully. "But I don't know. I must admit I've had my own doubts. What can I tell them about you? What have I learned? I should be out there assisting them in their work, not closeted with you in some guessing game. What I don't understand is why you don't do something—anything except sit and stare. We don't know what to make of you, my friend."
The outer eyes roamed the wall, while that-which-perceives looked deep into the touch-man's mind. Beneath the veneer of reflex emotions lay a roil of conflicting motes. There was a question surfacing, slowly, the same query which formed each time they were together, rising ponderously, weighed down by reluctance, encumbered by motes of self-deception. There was a necessity there, a hunger. The touch-man had a fear that towered above all others when he faced the communicant, but it was a formless thing, without size or boundary. What the touch-man wanted was verification: proof, a mold in which to cast his fears, a shape, an outline. But while part of him cried out to be shown, another denied both the desire and the possibility, and the question was never allowed to reach maturity.
The communicant considered. Stet: he prodded the thought into being with a beat of his mind.
"Could you control my mind?" Emrys asked, amazed at himself. The words seemed to come from nowhere, least of all his own lips. He blinked. "Could you? Is there really such a power? Without drugs or tricks, hypnotism or the suive-machine? I—I want to know."
The empath did not take his eyes from the wall. White lips moved in a hoarse slur of syllables which Emrys did not understand.
"What? What did you say?" His palms felt moist; he found that he was trembling very gently.
Silence. Then pale hands parted the gray garments, fingers slipped within, extracted a small, flat container. One palm cradled the disk, the other deftly removed the lid. Inside there was something black and shiny.
"What is it—is it paint?"
Silence. Index and middle fingers of the right hand grazed the slick substance, rose slowly through the air to the high white forehead. Five swift strokes and the hand came away.
Emrys looked at the smear of black and said "Ha!" very distinctly. It was such a funny little squiggle. He said "Ha!" again, looked extremely surprised for an instant, and began to giggle. A crooked smile twitched to his lips. "Wh—what—"
His voice faltered as harsh, high-pitched laughter bubbled up like bile in his throat. The giddy amusement would not leave him. It festered and grew until he clutched at himself, howling within the laughter, eyes on the empath, on the walls, on his own shaking body. It went on: the laughter on his lips and the laughter in his head. It went on, surging into a mad hilarity before which no solemn thought could stand.
The amusement was as pure and as genuine as anything he had yet felt in his nineteen score and twelve.
At last the convulsions began to wind down into spasms, a silent heaving that left him struggling for breath. His head hurt and his jaws ached.
The hand rose again like a pale exotic bird toward the ludicrously emblazoned brow. In one swift motion the design was gone, the only mark of its existence a small, gray shad
ow on the blanched skin.
The feeling closed in upon itself and vanished.
Emrys took shuddering breaths and felt gingerly over sides and abdomen, chest and throat. Minutes passed.
Finally, massaging his aching neck, he asked hoarsely: "Why? For what reason?"
"You know," the empath replied softly in his own rough voice. "Now you are sure." The dark eyes finally deserted the wall as he leaned across the desk and began to leaf slowly through a file of dots. "It is in the Eng Barata that well-planted memory halves the need for later cultivation."
"I requested no gardening services," Emrys said with a scowl.
"Stet." The empath withdrew a second tab, laid it next to
the one Emrys had chosen. "A man stood in a road, paraly/ed by the fear that a snake lay beneath the stone at his feet. He stood for a long time in an agony of doubt, until a tremor shook the earth and the stone was rolled upon its side. A serpent was indeed coiled in the dust before him, but it was a small one, and harmless, and he stepped around it and went on his way. Strophe twelve, lux ten."
"Hmf. You're full of musty parables, once you decide to use your mouth." Emrys reached shakily into the second drawer, withdrew the crystal decanter, and poured himself a deep bowl of blue. "You know, March told me torture would make you more talkative. He neglected to specify which of us would be on the receiving end." He raised the bowl to his lips. Midway to his mouth, his hands began to tremble fiercely and he set the bowl carefully back on the desk.
"That snake's not as small as you seem to think," he said after a moment. "I hope I'm capable of covering the distance necessary to avoid it. But you're right—it is better to know. Now, can you give me your word that you will not employ this technique on me, on any of us, again?"
"No."
Emrys sighed. "Let's try this again. Under what circumstances would you find the need to use this power on one of us?"
"I do not know."
"Conjecture, then," Emrys said sourly.
"1 am incapable of conjecture. Each instant is new. Nothing is the same."
Emrys shook his head slowly back and forth.
"You make it very difficult for me to remain your defender, my friend."
The empath drew forth the tab he had chosen earlier, fed it into the embossed slot on Emrys' desk.
'This one."
A succession of images appeared in the center of the room, forming and melting as Emrys fingered the control plate:
Trees, a sky full of burnished silver, the wide shallow river which Emrys had named the Water,.. the three-dimensional flicker congealed around the image of a naked man.
"The kin," Emrys said aloud, knowing the identification had already been plucked from his mind.
He depressed his fingers slightly, and the creature began to move, walking slowly toward them through a forest glade where rain had fallen recently, spangling the leaves and clinging lightly to skin and hair. To Emrys it was a scene of primordial grace and mystery, the Adam-man out of legend roaming his garden prison. He had no idea what chords of response, if any, were touched behind the empath's black-and-white shell. The other was watching the projection silently, on his face the same immobile blankness which Emrys had translated variously over the past weeks as scorn, indifference, even imbecility. He found himself finally beginning to accept the outrageous notion that the young man sitting alongside his desk was incapable of human feeling—that it was not some fantastic children's tale, but that the other's mind had in fact been so constructed or conditioned as to omit the possibility of a spontaneously generated emotion.
The empath's eyes were half closed. He seemed to be daydreaming rather than examining the kin. Emrys wondered briefly if his guest was communing with that "Other" he had mentioned during one of their previous meetings, the satellite personality to which he claimed to have deeded a portion of his brain.
The empath watched as the kin wandered through the wood with steps of measured grace. But Emrys watched only the creature that sat at his side.
The day was wild, wind whipping through the treetops and showering the pocket meadows with tiny almond-shaped leaves. The empath climbed slowly to the crest of a gently sloping incline. He stood there awhile with hands clasped loosely at his back, measuring the surrounding countryside with first the low and then the high senses at his command.
Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin had brought him one picture of the world, inadequate and deceptive as inevitably it must be. He removed himself from the influence of the lesser senses. That-which-perceives expanded radially, moving like a wavefront through woodland and meadow, over river and hillside, changing his picture of the world with each small flicker of life it encountered.
Immediately behind him was the turbulence of his escort's mind, while from the northeast came a subdued murmur of motes analogous to the rush of a distant waterfall, which identified the occupants of the Hut.
Sounds were coming to him through the air. close behind. He lowered his perception and they revealed themselves as verbal speech, began to parcel themselves into words. Never in his life had he borne the touch of so many words against his ear as he was experiencing daily in that new place. Each mote that separated itself from the agitated haze of their minds seemed to produce its own string of syllables; it was as if the touch-men could conceive of nothing without immediately draping sounds around the thought.
" — Hut says we've almost reached it, so be prepared for a jolt. The first time you approach one of them, there's a sort of barrier effect, as I told you before, but once you're past it — "
The empath withdrew from the vibrating mind, and allowed the words to blur back into meaningless noise. He marshaled his high senses to the region directly in front of him and moved forward.
There had been a momentary lapse in the continuity of his perception, something which he had never experienced before. His mind dipped automatically into the reservoir of the Other:
No information.
It was as if he had reentered for a fraction of a second the complete withdrawal of the anchorite stage, but with no bondsman there to fix upon; or as if the world itself had flickered out of existence, like a great eye blinking.
Then he saw it: the creature from the image. Scented it, heard its small movements through the grass, as all of the low senses flooded back unchanged. He reached out with his mind in the superficial probe of the shellscan. Nothing. Blank as an imago in consultation with a noumenon, the human likeness remained before his eyes while the opaque flowing continued within his mind.
He counted slowly under his breath, relinquishing a portion of the control of his brain to enable the Other to prepare his body for the exertion of the deep-delve. He recited the proper phrases from the Eng, then felt a flowing and a gathering begin in his mind. Reaching deep within, he formed the requisite
motes, waited as the Other echoed them. He felt his body lean slightly forward.
His eyes opened a hundred years later.
From somewhere there was the sound of chirping. Sunset bruised the west, a mass of silver clouds hung over the mountains to the north. The rest of the sky above his face was a dark, irregular gray, like a sheet of metal blotched with acid.
He was conscious of a memory, as of something from the distant past: the sensation of falling, a long, timeless descent through a silver sky, while all around him the bright clouds boiled upward.
Then the face of the touch-man swung into view. Soon there were other faces, all bobbing like lanterns above him, and he understood that he was on his back. He pushed up unsteadily on his elbows.
He lay among reeds and grass, not far from the river. The air was full of babbling, jumbled words and motes competing for his attention.
"—following step for step, as if they were both on the sar 3 Dance. When they neared the river he collapsed, just crumpled like a doll, and he's been lying there ever since, unconscious, until you got here. He doesn't seem to be injured, but I thought it best to—"
The
communication was directed toward the individual who knelt at his side, a strip of material studded with small vials and capsules in her hand. She touched a blue lozenge to the base of his neck, her auburn hair falling against his cheek as she peered into his eyes.
Strength returned to him gradually. He pushed her trembling fingers away and looked past her, scanning with his eyes until he found the creature. It had not wandered far; he saw it as a slowly moving figure cloaked in shadows on the other side of the river.
He pooled his thoughts and sent them outward again, searching.
Nothing.
"As I understand it, Ferranzano is the Cohen's expert on linguistic modes. Are you at all familiar with his work?" Emrys raised his eyes to Marysu above the notepad. "More to the point, can you deceive him?"
Moth dust and silvershadow marked out her brows today. She drew them together and pursed her lips. "Familiar with his work? Sweet Jesu! I should be deeply insulted by that question, were it not for your demonstrated ignorance of the field. Yude Ferranzano is a dilettante whose nodding acquaintance with linguistic modes comes through an ex-Chaliceman by the name of Maune, herself a competent but depressingly unimaginative wordsmith who, by the way, could not begin to unravel my simplest phoneme braid on her very best day."
She drew a kephel stick from the pouch at her belt and pinched its tip. The slender wand trailed a faint purple banner as she settled it in her wrist holder. "Better to ask if your gentle Dancer is equal to the task of inserting my creation in the creature's mouth without mangling either of them. The language of the kin will be a remarkable piece of work, I assure you, and I'd prefer it were not butchered."
"Hm. Of course, that will be for the two of you to work out together, but I'm certain March will more than satisfy your requirements. His ranking on the Block is comparable to your own, according to the Hut. Ah, excuse me: Raille and Choss have joined us."
Emrys waited for the latecomers to seat themselves at the table.
"I'll only keep you for a minute. There's something I think we have to do—as soon as possible, if you agree. I've instructed the Hut to begin preparation, subject to your approval, to sever our link with the Net."